Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. And it’s quiet. No one sneaks up on a dog in the desert. A dog can hear your car coming for several miles and will see you coming almost as far away. By the time you arrive he has developed a level of anticipation.

From 1995 to 1998 I was working on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert at east-end of the Morongo Valley in Southern California. As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car. Sometime in 1996 I began to bring along a 35mm camera equipped with a motor drive and loaded with a fast and grainy black-and-white film. The process was simple; when I saw a dog coming toward the car I would pre-focus the camera and set the exposure. With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film. I’ll admit that I was not above turning around and taking a second pass in front of a house with an enthusiastic dog.

Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. It could be viewed as a visceral and kinetic dance. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.

- John Divola, 2004

("Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert" by John Divola - see series here - under "2000s")

This site is generally about our visceral, inexplicable, and sometimes ecstatic connection to animals and/or artistic representations of animals. It attempts to understand what animals mean to us both as living creatures and as powerful symbols that reach deep into our mind's eye and shape many aspects of our own consciousness.

Anthroporphism is something we seem biologically programed to do. As humans, we are prone to sentimentalize objects, ideas, and of course, animals to fit our perceptual, behavioral, and emotional apparatus. Since we can never fully comprehend the inner life of an animal, how shall we treat their "otherness" as we share life on Earth together? With respect to be certain. Still, we are left with our own skewed and humanized impressions, which manifest over and over in our culture - powerful reminders of our chosen "departure" from the nature and our animal cousins.